Vintage Muses

This week, amongst many other things, I fell in love again with the one shot music video. I was on my MGMT Pandora channel when this super catchy song came on by Vampire Weekend. Eeeyuuuuck… what is that? Some teeny booper band? What a horrid name!

Yes, it may be teeny booper and horrid, but OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!! They’re music video for Oxford Comma got me all excited:

Now, one shot music videos aren’t new to me. I went on a youtube Michel Gondry binge months ago. Gondry is one of my favorite directors and he had his start with some amazing music videos. He did my favorite Bjork song btw (Hyperballad). The video that most blew my mind of his was Kylie Minogue’s Come Into My World which is located here since it won’t let me embed in a playlist. I still don’t know how he made it. To me, it’s just magic! What I love about it too, is that it reminds me so much of Jacques Tati–which makes sense since Gondry is French. Surely Tati influenced him (long wide shots and one takes). What attracts me so much to the one shot is the choreography and the amount of rehearsing and planning to create it, it’s so inspiring to me. Each action and visual is so calculated like brushstrokes in a masterpiece painting. So it’s not surprising to me that some of the most watched music videos on youtube are all one-shot: Beyoncé’s – Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It) (located here) and OK Go’s Here it Goes Again (located here).

^ 2 Comments...

I’m pretty sure I remember hearing Gondry say something about Tati influencing him but I could be making it up. His music videos are phenomenal. My lecturer explained a little how the Kylie video would’ve been made but I’m a little too vague on it to explain. I think he mentioned something about using markers (the ladder, I think, and the post she swings around) as points of where to kind of overlay stuff.
Anyway, I love one-shot stuff, too. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope was as close to one shot as the technology would allow back then! (The reels of film weren’t long enough for the entire film to be a one-shot)